Webinar Recap: You need to watch this archive! Public Computers and 2.0 Tools

Wow, Robin and Brenda did such a great job in today’s webinar. Robin Hastings from the Missouri River Regional Library provided interesting insider information on how her library has opened up two way communication and sharing with their community using 2.0 tools. As Robin said, “If it is a social media site where our patrons are, that is where we are.” How fantastic!

Here is one slide with some great tips to get your library connecting to patrons online:

Next month MaintainIT will publish a whole chapter on Web 2.0--in fact, a whole new Cookbook!--so make sure you sign up for the newsletter to get notified when it is available on the web site.

We had over 50 people participate! But don’t worry if you missed it you can always listen to the archive (as I did, my Internet went down for the first 26 minutes--horrors!!).

And on October 16 the next 30 minute webinar will be with Lori Reed, “Get Your Game On: Quick Tips to Start a Gaming Program in Your Library.” Register now!

Thanks, Stephanie! I'm sorry you had Internet issues, but I guess that underscores the need for the handy archived versions of the webinars.

One of the interesting discussions we had while looking at this slide... how do you know where your patrons are? Robin suggested observation and shared her own experiences in the MRRL computer lab. She mentioned looking around the lab of 30 computers one day, all of them occupied, and estimated that about 25 of them were being used to access MySpace! So that was a very clear indicator to her that MySpace is one of the places many users are at.

I was thinking about other ways of determining where users are online. Is anyone using software to track the most popular sites accessed on public access machines?